Candle in his hand was flickering, so he was afraid it would go out and leave them both lost in the darkness, but she had no such concern — she knew this passage better than the way to her own home. Finally, they reached the small room.
“Here he is, as always!” Áedammair proclaimed and lit the oil lamp. “Saint Connor — the brightest head of his time and our sacred founder.”
When she uncovered the glass coffin and encouraged Shihi to look closely, he hesitated but then remembered why he came here in a first place. Saint Connor looked fine — better than a three-hundred-year-old corpse would usually look like — despite his brownish skin and… well, everything else. Shihi sighed, pressing the book to his chest, and glanced at Áedammair: her face shined with pride and enthusiasm.
“I’m surprised you’ve never been down there.”
“Well, I’ve visited this place one time during my freshman years,” Shihi said, “and never really felt like I want to return.”
“So, why now? I understand how hard it is to resist this man’s charm, but dead men are in my field of study and you’re teaching language.”
“Well, as for that…” Shihi felt quite nervous, as Saint Connor watched him judgmentally with his eye sockets. “Let me start from this: what if I told you we are inches away from losing our true language? I would even say we’ve already lost it! We’re writing precisely but listen to our awful speech — in a few years we will forget how to pronounced our own names. Our golden era, our…”
“Get to the point,” Áedammair said grimly, as her initial excitement faded away with Shihi’s first words.
“You see, and I understand it’s a very sensitive subject… Just, promise, think about what it means for a science before refusing.”
Shihi sighed once again, bracing himself. He knew Áedammair would not like it.
“Could you, maybe, raise Sait Connor from the dead?”
Her face went red with anger before he even finished the sentence. He expected she would refuse and, maybe, scold him a bit. He also expected her to lose all faith in him and humanity but the utter disgust on her face was indescribable.
“How dare you,” she was shaking, “how dare you even ask me that.”
“As I was trying…”
“Oh, don’t even start on this again! Do you really think I disregard honor of the man who built all of this? Listen, even if I could, I would never do that: he’d done enough for science, let him rest in peace!”
“But is he really that different from those students’ bodies you use?”
“It is their will! They all know what they’re signing for! And even then I put them back to rest after a while. Do you think a necromancer have no sense of morality? What do you know about necromancy at all! You cannot even imagine the consequences!”
Shihi lowered his head and said nothing. Áedammair was too angry to even try to explain to him the consequences, so she put out the lamp and hastened to leave, cursing him along the way. “She probably just isn’t powerful enough to do it,” Shihi thought to himself, though he knew it wasn’t the reason.
Only now he noticed the candle is about to be out, so he hurried, not forgetting to cover the glass coffin with withered sacred founder in it.
“Good night, old man,” Shihi said before leaving the room.
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